more notes on Gross:[Gross’] first thesis was: The realization of the anarchist alternative to the patriarchal order of society has to begin with the destruction of the latter. Without hesitation, [he] owned up to practicing this -in accordance with anarchist principles – by the propaganda of the “example”, first by an exemplary way of life aimed at destroying the limitations of society within himself; second as a psychotherapist by trying to realize new forms of social life experimentally in founding unconventional relationships and communes (for example in Ascona from where he was expelled as an instigator of “orgies”) . . .
His second thesis: Whoever wants to change the structures of power (and production) in a repressive society, has to start by changing these structures in himself and to eradicate the “authority that has infiltrated one’s own inner being” (Sombart 1991, pp. 1l0 – 111).
Gross recognised the way in which family structures that violate the individual reflect those of patriarchal society and was the first to empathize deeply with the child in this conflict.
His lifelong concern with ethical issues culminated for Gross in the concept of an “inborn ‘i n s t i n c t o f m u t u a l a i d’ (Gross 1919a, p. 682)” which he described as the “basic ethical instinct (Gross 1914, p. 529)”. In 1919, Gross published “Protest and Morality in the Unconscious” (Gross 1919a). Jung only published on that subject towards the end of his life in the late 50’s (Jung 1958; 1959). Gross was explicitly referring to Kropotkin and his discovery of the principle of mutual aid in the field of biology. Mutuality is a core concept of anarchist thought. 150 years previously Proudhon had used the term “mutualism” for the free relationship of groups of equals that exist through mutual exchange. Kropotkin elaborated this concept in his book “Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution” (Kropotkin 1904), first published in England in 1902. Contemporary researchers in biology, anthropology and genetics seem to confirm this theory, according to a recent article in the Guardian, where Natalie Angier writes about “Why we can’t help helping each other”: “It’s not simply noble to be nice to our fellow man – it’s hardwired into our genes” (Angier 2001). Gross was the first analyst to introduce this ethical concept into psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Future readings?
perhaps next week we will read something by Reich, then an excerpt from Breakout (Before Marcuse and Laing, before Heidegger and Sartre, even before Freud, the way was prepared for the anarcho-psychological critique of economic man, of all codes of ideology or absolute morality, and of scientific habits of mind. First published in 1974, this title traces this philosophical tradition to its roots in the nineteenth century, to the figures of Stirner, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and to their psychological demolition of the two alternative axes of social theory and practice, a critique which today reads more pertinently than ever, and remains unanswered.
To understand this critique is crucial for an age which has shown a mounting revulsion at the consequences of the Crystal Palace, symbol at once of technologico-industrial progress and its rationalist-scientist ideology, an age whose imaginative preoccupations have telescoped onto the individual, and whose interest has switched from the social realm to that of anarchic, inner, ‘psychological man’.), then something by Lacan?

Also – we are starting the countdown to BASTARD 2017 (April 23), with a suggested theme of evil. so think about who you’d like to suggest/invite for workshop presenters!